by Jim Mattis
Three-star positions being scarce, I was prepared and ready to go home. But in the spring of 2006, Commandant Mike Hagee surprised me with the best possible news.
“JIM,” GENERAL HAGEE SAID, “it’s time you got back into the fight.”
Like an old cavalry horse whose ears perk up when he hears the Boots and Saddles bugle call, I stood a little straighter that day. Iraq was looking bad, and the American public was losing patience. But a leader’s role is problem solving. If you don’t like problems, stay out of leadership. Smooth sailing teaches nothing, and there was nothing smooth about the Middle East. Plus, I’d be back with the troops.
In the summer of 2006, I took command of the forty thousand troops of I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) on the West Coast as well as operational command of twenty-five thousand Marines in the Middle East, prominently including thirteen thousand in Iraq and four thousand in Afghanistan. I was sure this would be my final job, and, having served so long in the region, I could not have chosen any duty I was better prepared to carry out.
As the commander of I MEF, I was also double-hatted as commander of Marine Corps Forces Central Command (MARCENT), one of five operational commanders (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, and Special Operations Forces) who dispatched and supported the tactical units in the CENTCOM region. Although my home base was Camp Pendleton, I would spend considerable time in the Middle East and at my operational headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
My boss, Army General John Abizaid, was now in his third year as commander of CENTCOM. He was a wise mentor, and we shared a common outlook. He had long impressed me with his grasp of history and his penetrating way of getting to the essence of any issue. He rightly considered service doctrine to be only a starting point. As with any war or complex situation, there was no cookie-cutter model that would lead to success in Iraq. The country was like looking into a kaleidoscope: change one element and a wholly different, unexpected pattern emerges. The Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Iranians, Syrians, United Nations, European politics, American politics—all the parts shaken together and poured out across the Middle East and onto the desks at CENTCOM. On one occasion, we were caught off guard by an unanticipated political decision from the Baghdad government. “We’re too old to be surprised,” Abizaid said. “Adjust to it.”
Adjusting was certainly necessary. In the summer and early fall of 2006, the mood was souring—in the press, in Washington policymaking circles, and even at operational headquarters in Iraq. Some in Congress and in the press were declaring that the war was lost. As the senior Marine in the operational chain of command, I spoke out strongly against that mood. Attitudes are caught, not taught. The morale of a fighting force, from corporal to four-star general, must be positive. With the press and in my visits, I seized every opportunity to repeat my touchstones. No better friend: To the one million Sunnis in Anbar, we offered friendship and protection. No worse enemy: To the terrorists, we offered a grave.
As long as the population lived in fear and kept silent about the insurgents among them, the war would go on. We had been at this for more than three years in Anbar, with little observable success in connecting the Sunni tribes to the Shiite-heavy government in Baghdad. We were still building a new Iraqi Army, while the tens of thousands who had belonged to the purged Baath Party remained beyond the pale and marginalized. After interminable meetings, policy papers, plans, and pontification, I still couldn’t detect a coherent model for jump-starting the moribund economy or improving the standard of living. By now, Iraq faced both an insurgency and an incipient civil war—basically it was a free-for-all, with the Iraqi people paying the price.
The press reported that we were stalemated. Having been there in 2003 and 2004, I took a longer view. On my visits in 2006, I noticed that the sheiks who in 2004 had resented us now came forward to harangue me with a litany of complaints. I took these discussions as a sign of progress. Edging closer, the tribes were no longer holding us at arm’s length.
But that wasn’t enough. The Sunnis themselves would have to fight for their freedom. Yet Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was now so strong that only by allying with the U.S. troops could the Anbari tribes overthrow the terrorists. They had to gamble that we’d remain steadfast—or they’d be dead men walking.
“Hold firm,” I told my Marines. “These tribes have centuries of tradition. If we hold the line, they will eventually fight for themselves, but it can only happen with our presence.”
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Throughout the fall of 2006, I delivered the same message. Keep training and encouraging local forces. Stay professional and polite. Whenever you show anger or disgust toward civilians, it’s a victory for the insurgents. Victory is not an abstraction. We will train Iraqi forces and patrol until the last terrorist is dead.
In Ramadi, our Army brigade commander, Colonel Sean MacFarland, and his savvy Special Forces adviser, Captain Travis Patriquin, were impressed with a young sheik named Abdul Sattar, also known as Abu Risha. In September, Sean had rescued Sattar from an ambush. A few weeks later, Sattar proclaimed the formation of the Sahwa—the Awakening. The sheiks would no longer sleep while Al Qaeda took control of their tribes. He contacted the Iraqi press, proclaiming that he had the support of twenty-five of the thirty-one tribes in Anbar, which meant thirty thousand armed tribesmen. An inspirational leader, Sattar was expressing a hope, not a reality. At this point, possibly six mostly minor tribes stood firmly with him. The others waited to see what would happen. In my meetings with MacFarland, he was adamant that Sattar was the man. Things were changing. And as I moved around in November, I heard story after story along the same lines.
“We should help all the tribes,” I repeated at every meeting in Iraq, “kill every last one of those AQI bastards. You’re making a snowball. You pack the snow, it gets harder. Keep pressing and it fractures and falls apart.”
The Sunni tribes were concluding—having exhausted all other alternatives—that we were their last, best hope for survival. We didn’t need formal agreements. As a gesture of friendship, we presented some of the sheiks with Marine officer dress swords when they came over to our side.
One day on a back road in the middle of nowhere, my vehicle had a flat. While the tire was being changed, I wandered out into a field, where an old farmer was shoveling away in his irrigation ditch. We sat down and talked in passable English. He was a Sunni who had been run out of his home in Baghdad by Shiite death squads. I gave him a pack of cigarettes as we spoke. When I started to say good-bye, he stopped me and fumbled for words.
Pointing to his heart, the farmer said, “Here, I want you gone now.” Then he pointed to his head. “Here, I know we need you to stay.”
I joined Sheik Sattar at a large outdoor tribal sheik meeting soon after. He was stronger than ever. As he walked around introducing me to the other sheiks, the warmth and deference he was shown were unmistakable. Having spent enough time in the Middle East and lost too many allies, I warned him, “You be careful. You’re a bigger threat to Al Qaeda right now than I am. They will try to kill you.”
He smiled knowingly and nodded.
When the Anbar Awakening flowered in the second half of 2006, the key to it was the bottom-up relationship between local leaders and the U.S. battalions. Without fear, a sheik could argue with Colonel MacFarland, disagree and pound his fist on the table. If the sheik did that with his erstwhile Al Qaeda partners, he would be shot. In fact, I’ll wager that at one time or another, every grunt platoon sergeant, platoon commander, and company commander was chewed out by a tribal leader pissed off about something.
Encouraged by the American forces, the Iraqi government forces, on the one hand, and the sheiks and armed tribal members, on the other, achieved a satisfactory sharing of power. John Kelly had identified this as part of the solution when he briefed John Toolan, Joe Dunford, and me in early 2004, pointing out the key role the tribes played. I found it gallin
g that it had taken years of bitter fighting for all sides to arrive at the only sensible conclusion.
At the end of 2006, I gave the press my assessment of Anbar. “When you see the amount of violence and criminal activity,” I said, “it is easy to say this just isn’t working or at best we are just going sideways, when in fact a lot of progress has been made….I don’t want to put lipstick on a pig, but the one point I would make very strongly is this: Violence and progress can and do coexist….I think it will take five years. Over that period, we will see a declining level of U.S. forces and casualties and a corresponding decline in enemy effectiveness.”
When I made those remarks, I didn’t realize how out of step I was with the gloom inside Washington. The reason for the disconnect was that we had two different battlegrounds in the Iraqi theater, each going in a different direction. Anbar was now improving, while Baghdad was teetering out of control. Naturally, the focus was on Iraq’s capital. The President did not mention the Anbar Awakening, which had already occurred, and may have known nothing about it. At the highest level, the ramifications stemming from the ongoing shift of the Sunnis had not yet been grasped. But in Anbar, we had turned the corner and conclusively seized the offensive.
Visiting Ramadi in February 2007, I said, “The war in Anbar is being won.” Wherever I went, the atmosphere of victory was pervasive. I shucked my armor and helmet when walking the streets of Ramadi. I ate chicken kebabs in downtown Fallujah. I felt the shared camaraderie when our grunts, Iraqi soldiers, police, and armed tribesmen gathered around to tell me their war stories, some of which included the Marines retaking Fallujah back in late 2004.
I flew to Baghdad, where Dave Petraeus was assuming command. I agreed with him that in order to consolidate our gains in Anbar, one fresh “surge” Marine battalion would suffice. Dave immediately grasped the idea and extended the concept of the Awakening all the way across Iraq. He offered the Sunnis modest pay and close association with American troops to act as home guards for their villages and city neighborhoods.
The cost was high. Both the heroic Sheik Sattar and his sturdy supporter, Army Captain Travis Patriquin, died in the fight to retake Ramadi. But by the fall of 2007, the winning trend seemed undeniable. Our strategy, first identified by John Kelly three years before, of working with—not against—the tribes was finally paying off.
What did I take away from this? We had to play the ball where it lay in Iraq. There are no do-overs, and we had to make the best of it. The cost had been high over years of heartbreaking violence to innocent Iraqis and in grievous losses to our troops. Despair was understandable. Staring failure in the face, we had to hold the line. By standing strong with our persistent presence, the innate strength of John Kelly’s initial assessment—that we had to break the tribes from Al Qaeda—won out in the end.
However, the mood in the States had turned even more negative. In September, when Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Dave Petraeus testified before the Senate, an anti-war group took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, entitled “General Betray Us.” A senator declared, “This war is lost.” It was an acrimonious debate, with no consensus inside the Senate that our soldiers and Marines were achieving our national objectives. Defeatism was the soup du jour: poorly articulated policy goals, a wavering and initially under-resourced plan that lacked a coherent strategic approach, and our inability to define progress meant that the timing for testimony was unfortunate. Despite the cards stacked against them, Crocker and Petraeus were persuasive enough to gain congressional support for continuing the surge.
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The operational successes and strategic opportunities had come at a cost. Prior to my arrival as MARCENT commander, a tragic incident occurred that would demand much of my attention. In November 2005, a Marine squad traveling in four Humvees had turned a corner in the restive town of Haditha, seventy miles northwest of Ramadi. One Humvee was suddenly torn apart by an IED. A well-liked and respected Marine, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, was killed, and two other Marines were badly burned. Amid the shouts and commands, in the ensuing action the squad shot five men who had stepped out of a car. They also assaulted two suspect houses, firing and throwing grenades. In less than an hour, fourteen Iraqi men, four women, and six children were killed.
As initially reported by the battalion, the deaths at Haditha did not gain the command attention they deserved. In fact, the initial report was erroneous, implying that most of the casualties were insurgents or civilians caught in crossfire.
Four months later, Iraqi officials gave Time magazine photographs and names of the victims, including the women and children. Haditha immediately captured worldwide attention as a symbol of an-out-of-control war corrupting the soul of America. The publisher of Harper’s magazine, John MacArthur, epitomized that reaction. “Marines are, if anything,” he wrote, “more dangerous to civilians than the Army, because of the way they’re juiced up in basic training. Now the Marines seem to have their own My Lai, and I’ll bargain that the murders in Haditha were unexceptional events in the dirty war we’re fighting in Iraq—an unjustifiable and unwinnable war created by venal politicians.” A prominent politician said that “the Marine squad had killed innocent civilians in cold blood. They actually went into the houses and killed women and children.”
Even as Marines were depicted as “juiced up” and “cold-blooded killers,” daily I read press stories, couched in a passive voice, about “bombs detonating in a marketplace,” or, “research shows that 27,000 civilian deaths from violence were reported in 2006.”
Note the neutral wordings: “bombs detonating” and “deaths from violence.” It sounds as if a hurricane or other force of nature caused the “incidents.” This agent-less reporting granted a moral bye to an enemy that had murdered hundreds of women and children. Conversely, mistakes by our forces were reported in the active voice, putting them in the worst possible light, as if these acts defined the customary performance of our units.
AQI’s narrative was tyranny dressed up in false religious garb, and these reports played directly into that corrupt narrative. In the United States, we had no counter-narrative. During my time at Quantico, I had sat down with reporters and expressed my concerns.
I said, “This enemy has decided that the war will be fought in the narrative, in the media. If we don’t have people like you [reporters] committed [to factual reporting], trying to figure out the complexities of this war and…put it in terms their audience can understand, then we lose the moral high ground with the global audience.”
I wasn’t asking that immoral action on our part be excused; rather, I was arguing for journalists to practice their profession with the same integrity they expected of us. Intentionally attacking noncombatants, otherwise known as innocent women and children, or endangering them by firing from among the innocent was never our style; but it was our enemy’s modus operandi. There was no moral equivalency between jihadist terrorists and our troops. In the morally bruising environment of war, we still hold our Marines to the highest moral standards. Discipline is our protective fabric. I took career-ending actions, including some up the chain of command above the tactical unit. We will maintain America’s ethical high ground.
Our approach was not new, or an outgrowth of political correctness. In 1863, President Lincoln approved a general order to all Union soldiers: “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease in this account to be moral beings, responsible for one another and to God.”
In 2003–2004, thirty-five thousand troops rotated through the 1st Marine Division under my command. I had convened twenty-three general courts-martial—less than one per one thousand Marines serving in a most brutal environment. The charges in most cases were for abusing, but never killing, prisoners. Some of those few abuses were minor, like putting a gunnysack blindfold over a prisoner’s head in the extreme summer heat. But I made clear that I
would not tolerate any such conduct. In the Naval Service you are held to account for breaches in discipline.
As the commander, it was my responsibility to determine whether to court-martial Marines responsible for the deaths of civilians in Haditha. I received several boxes of investigative materials about the shootings. I sat alone night after night, reading every word, more than nine thousand pages—the equivalent of two dozen books. Were the congressman and the magazine publisher correct in judging that Marines had killed innocent civilians in cold blood? This is not easy analysis: the world of an infantryman is unlike any other, and a soldier’s motivations in battle are hard to judge from the outside looking in. Yet empathy must never cloud a commander’s judgment or excuse wrongdoing.
I had to determine what had caused the deaths of the civilians. Who should be judged culpable? Were these criminal acts, deserving of court-martial? The grunt makes instant, difficult choices in the heat of battle. He may open a door and hesitate, and a week later be buried six thousand miles away. Or he may open a door, perceive an immediate threat, and open fire, only to kill a noncombatant.
I examined the maps and photos, read the interrogations and witness statements. I took notes on what each Marine had said, and how he had reacted. I went to Haditha and walked the neighborhood. On a schematic, I followed the squad’s actions after one was killed and two others wounded. Believing they were under fire from high ground, they assaulted one house and then another, firing and hurling grenades.